The Dark Room(49)

Cain looked at the screen. Based on the log, after Castelli had come home, the house had been quiet for nearly five hours. The system didn’t log gunshots, didn’t record the slack thump of a body collapsing from the desk to the rug. By midnight, Castelli was dead. But was the house actually quiet the whole time? No one had come in or out. No door swung open, no window slid up. Nothing triggered the laser trip lines protecting the backyard and the cliff stairs. Each point in the system had a status bar, and everything was quiet.

The next entry was at 2:58 a.m., when the front door opened. It had to be Mona Castelli, because her car had dropped her off somewhere close to three.

Cain let it play out in his mind: She comes into the entry hall, dropping her keys and purse on the table near the door. Stumbling to the kitchen, she pours another drink. She wanders upstairs with it, looking for her husband. The bedroom’s empty. The doors to all the bathrooms are standing open, and the lights are off. She tries the study door, but it’s locked. She knocks and there’s no answer.

The next log entry was at 3:22 a.m. The front door opened. Cain watched that, too: Nagata steps inside, catching Mona. She’d opened the door, but now she can barely stand up. In eight minutes, Nagata will start calling Cain. First she tries to get the story. What happened? Where’s Harry? She checks the house and sees the study door, the spare key jutting from the heavy antique lock. She doesn’t go in.

Cain looked at Fischer.

“What do you think?”

“I think you better throw a search warrant together, unless Mr. Petrovic wants to burn a disk right now.”

“Bring the paper,” Roger said. “There’s a privacy clause in all the contracts. No information released unless compelled by a court.”

“All right,” Cain said. It was only one o’clock. “You going to be here all day, or should we serve your office?”

“Here’s good—I know what you want.”

“I might need till four o’clock,” Cain said.

“I’ll be here.”





17


AFTER LEAVING THE Petrovics’, they’d gone briefly back into Castelli’s study. Sumida’s team hadn’t finished photographing it yet, and the evidence was still in place. While Fischer called Melissa Montgomery to get Alexa’s address, Cain gave Sumida his keys and asked him to have someone drive his car back to Bryant Street and leave it there. He looked out the blood-speckled window at the street below. There were mobile news vans everywhere, telescoping antennas rising like masts along the street. Greenberg had been sworn in at City Hall, and the CSI vans were still in Castelli’s driveway. It had only been a matter of time. He could even hear a helicopter, maybe the Channel 2 NewsChopper. Whatever it was, it had been circling awhile now, invisible above the inversion layer, waiting for the fog to clear so that it could shoot something for the evening news.

But none of these people would get the footage they really wanted. Dr. Levy had backed her morgue van up to the garage and loaded Castelli’s body bag directly into the back without ever taking him outside. There’d have been no way to see it from the street or from above.

When Fischer had what she needed from Melissa Montgomery, they left. They stripped off their gloves and plastic boots, then crossed the tape line at the edge of the driveway and pushed through the waiting reporters to reach Fischer’s car.



“They’re not following us, are they?” Cain asked.

“They’d stick out if they did,” Fischer said. “Vans like that.”

“Keep an eye out anyway.”

Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, then went back to the front. She was driving down Geary, Cain sitting in the passenger seat.

“Back there, you asked me what I thought,” Fischer said. She took her foot off the gas, let her sedan creep back to the speed limit. “I’ll tell you—what I really think. It’s got to be suicide, right?”

“It looks like it.”

She swerved around a meter maid’s double-parked trike, the rooftop yellow light flashing.

“His hands tested positive for powder residue,” Fischer said. “The alarm log shows the rest.”

“It’s compelling,” Cain said. “It makes a good picture.”

“It’s more than that—unless you want to go off the deep end and say Petrovic altered the logs.”

“He seemed more reasonable than that.”

“He is more reasonable than that,” Fischer said. “So what do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

They passed Twenty-Second Avenue and he looked to his right. It was sunny up that way, closer to the park. Lucy would have started giving lessons at eight. This morning, before he ran out the front door, he could have taken the time to leave a note. It wouldn’t have made any difference to Castelli. What was two minutes, compared to disappearing in the middle of the night without saying where he’d gone?

“You don’t know,” Fischer said.

It had to be obvious he was holding back on her. At some point, he would have to bring her into the basement at 850 Bryant and show her the body he had. But he wanted to develop that a little further on his own first. He still couldn’t prove she was the girl in the pictures, that Castelli had anything to do with burying her alive.